I was seeking a list of suppletive comparative adjectives such as the following:

good --> better (*gooder)

It appears there is no authoritative published list.

Such suppletion occurs in 3 of the 34 languages in the Surrey Suppletion Database (namely: Basque, Georgian and Russian - the latter is the only Indo-European language in the database). Within Indo-European, comparative suppletion occurs in many Germanic, Slavic and Romance languages, and in Welsh (Wurzel 1987). A (partial) list, corresponding to responses received thus far (and others from the literature), is given below.

Some questions of definition arise in compiling this list.

Adjectival verbs:

Fiona Mc Laughlin notes that in Wolof, (Atlantic, Niger-Congo), adjectivals (lexical items most likely to be adjectives) are all verbs, yet even in this language, there are suppletive adjectival verbs that have only a comparative meaning:

See: Mc Laughlin 2004 for some discussion. I have limited the list below to adjectives, though this limitation is not for any principled reason.

Quantificational determiners / adverbs:

Another element which may be analysed as showing comparative suppletion is quantificational determiners such as:

English: many/much - more - most (a) little - less - least

I have not systematically included these in the list below.

Definition of Suppletion (1)

Marcel Erdal gives the Turkish form beter 'worse' as a potential candidate for suppletion of fena or kötü 'bad'. However, regular comparatives forms of both fena and kötü exist: daha fena, daha kötü, and beter is restricted in its distribution (M. Kelepir, S. Sener, N. Sener, pc). I have therefore excluded beter from the list on the grounds that it does not supplant the regular comparative form. Compare (perhaps?) English optimal which has a meaning similar to best, but which does not supplant the superlative best.

Defintion of Suppletion (2)

I have included in the list only those forms which have 'full' suppletion, that is, are built on a distinct root. Some authors treat other irregular (phonologically unpredictable) alternations (such as German ''hoch'' --> ''höhe'' = 'high, higher') as suppletion or ''weak suppletion'' (Wurzel). I have left these off the list.

The following is a list of suppletive comparatives culled from the responses to the Linguist query cited above. I intend to post a more complete list to my web page if I develop this further. (I have included superlatives where these were given, but have not done so consistently).